Denial of an ethnic problem: issue purely terrorism

Mahinda and Gotabaya's war marked a regression to a time before the 1987 Indo-Sri Lanka Accord, when the existence of an ethnic problem in Sri Lanka and the need for a political solution to it was routinely denied by Sinhala politicians. The country's ethnic conflict was reduced to a “terrorist issue”, and all Tamils were labeled terrorists. This was the justification for Black July - the anti-Tamil pogrom of July 1983, in response to the LTTE killing 13 soldiers in Jaffna, that ignited the Eelam War.

- BY TISARANEE GUNASEKARA

(Continued from last week)

Framing the final Eelam War as divinely mandated also enabled Mahinda and Gotabaya to prosecute it with total indifference to the fate of civilian Tamils. The no-holdsbarred confrontation with the LTTE that followed-made inevitable by the LTTE leader Prabhakaran's own intransigence and determination to win a separate Tamil state on the battlefield was termed a Humanitarian Offensive" with zero civilian casualties and a rescue operation to free ordinary Tamils fromthe LTTE'S clutches. Since the offensive could not kill Tamil civilians by definition, anyone who died at the hands of government forces had to be a terrorist.

A famous tale from the Mahavamsa, the foundational chronicle of Sinhala Buddhist history, was seminal in the effacement of all civilian casualties. After the Sinhala hero Dutugemunu defeats a Tamil king to unify the island of Lanka, he is overwhelmed with remorse at killing "a host numbering millions". Buddhist monks assuage his conscience by reminding him that he fought to save the faith. Killing non-Buddhists for the protection of Buddhism was no crime, for they were "unbelievers and men of evil life... not more to be esteemed than beasts."

Mahinda and Gotabaya's war marked a regression to a time before the 1987 Indo-Sri Lanka Accord, when the existence of an ethnic problem in Sri Lanka and the need for a political solution to it was routinely denied by Sinhala politicians. The country's ethnic conflict was reduced to a "terrorist issue", and all Tamils were labeled terrorists. This was the justification for Black July - the anti-Tamil pogrom of July 1983, in response to the LTTE killing 13 soldiers in Jaffna, that ignited the Eelam War.